A Desert Devoid Of Aptitude: The Death of Arizona Summit Law School

You folks may remember not too long ago when I celebrated over the smoldering remains of Charlotte School of Law, a purely for profit enterprise of the wonderful bunch of bastards known as Infinilaw. Infinilaw, which is a for-profit “leader” in the world of shady law school education, is a wonderful set of functional assholes that looked at the model of training and educating the future gatekeepers of justice, tossed a guy with absolutely no legal training or experience in either the practice or education of law in charge, and then boldly went forward to bilk the fuck out of some students as it promised them the chance to become lawyers. It operated three law schools in the not-too-distant days of far off 2016, being the flagship Florida Coastal, the now-defunct and rotting Charlotte School of Law, and the amazingly inept Arizona Summit.

This came quickly on the heels of the American Bar Association, a group not known in the past decade or so for its overwhelming desire to regulate the law schools that keep the “We’re a bar association, no, really, we swear we are” organization afloat, sent the school a notice back in June that it was going to yank the accreditation of the institution. You know, a notice that the school could have then forwarded out to the students even though it wasn’t really required to, and then bothered to keep the students updated in the developments related to it. Which…you know, it doesn’t look like it really did until right the fuck now. After it decided it wasn’t going to hold any goddamn classes.

If you haven’t been reading with me long enough to understand why this shit really burns the bottom of my Brooks Brothers Butt here, let me tell you the main issue. At no fucking point after they gained accreditation was Arizona Summit concerned with the admission of people that were likely to pass the goddamn bar exam or ever become fucking lawyers. Arizona Summit, like its deceased sister school Charlotte before it, made a goddamn niche in the shitlaw world by actively seeking out students with low LSAT and GPA scores, those students that would get turned away from any law school worth a good goddamn, under the guise of fostering diversity in the legal profession. And while I have no doubt that many of the students that went to Arizona Summit during its relatively brief life of bilking bastards of their student loan bucks, and who defied the odds to pass the bar, may be competent and diligent legal professionals, historically this was always a pretty goddamn small number of the student body. I mean, holy fucking shit, in July of 2016 less than 30% of the Arizona Summit graduates that took the goddamn Arizona bar exam managed to pass the goddamn thing!

That’s over 2/3 of the fucking class drastically goddamn failing to pass an exam of minimal competence for the practice of law. And lest ye say “Oh, well those students just weren’t motivated!” or some shit, take a goddamn look at the school’s bar exam pass rates from 2013 to present. This shit is a trend, with a hard and fast drop every goddamn year until now, when the ABA finally got off of their accreditation happy asses and realized that they had apparently given a license to print money to Jimmy McGill’s House of Law and Meth. Which is even funnier when you find out that the officials at Arizona Summit, in true Infinilaw fashion, told students to take the bar exam in neighboring New Mexico instead because it was fucking easier. Fucking Vince Gilligan missed the golden goddamn opportunity here, folks! All Walter White needed to do was sell students with about as much chance of becoming practicing lawyers as I do of playing the 1812 Overture with the sounds of my whiskey shits the dream of becoming lawyers. It’s like meth, only legal and more goddamn damaging since it cripples them for life and there’s no goddamn rehab for student loan payments.

But the real question now is what happens to the poor fucking souls that, in an effort to better their lives and shitty overall situations, and in an effort to pursue the dream of being a lawyer, put their trust in the business world bullshitters that we allowed to run a goddamn law school. The answer? Who the fuck knows. Infinilaw is, of course, more than happy to let these students attend, in person or online, courses at the Florida Coastal Sister School…you know, the one located in goddamn Florida and only eligible for 12 credits in the entirety of the law school transcript per the ABA requirements, and only 4 fucking credits a semester. So that’ll be really helpful if these people, who are mostly lower-income, can afford to move across the goddamn country or only have, like, 8 goddamn credit hours left before they get their J.D. I guess. Which is so fucking feasible.

Likewise, if the actual goddamn law school down the street will take them, such students may be able to transfer to Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law. But that’s no fucking guarantee either, now is it? Because that school, which actually has ABA accreditation still because it has some fucking admission standards other than “has a pulse and can fill out a FAFSA” may not want to take the same students that were unable to pass the bar in such great numbers that it literally got the school’s accreditation yanked. ASU has a fucking reputation to protect too, and not just a reputation of being the best beer buttchuggers in all of the Western U.S.

So what’s our takeaway here?

The same as fucking always. The ABA was trusted to monitor these institutions and verify that they were qualified to provide legal education and not become the fly-by-night diploma mills that we all feared they would. The ABA fell asleep at the switch, and the Infinilaw machine sold a dream that bent over and went hard at the students, spraying thick, streamy ropes of student loan debt all over their faces. And by the time the ABA woke the fuck up and noticed, the fuckening had already ended and the students were being tossed a rag and instructions to “Clean yourself up, kid, because you disgust me. Money’s in my pocket, take your crippling financial burden and get the fuck out.” And we need to fucking remember this shit the next time someone spouts off about ensuring access to the profession of law because yes we fucking do need to do that, absolutely. But we also need to make sure that motherfuckers with bank books bigger than their hearts aren’t going to use that shit as a way to completely fucking hundreds of people who want to do nothing more than better their position in life.